for the nonce, less solicitous for me than usual.

"Either you go or I go," she said. "Where's your revolver?"

I got out of bed at that, and went down the stairs. But I must
confess that I felt, the moment darkness surrounded me, considerably
less trepidation concerning the possible burglar than I felt as to
the darkness itself. Mrs. Johnson had locked herself in my bedroom,
and there was something horrible in the black depths of the lower
hall.

We are old-fashioned people, and have not yet adopted electric
light. I carried a box of matches, but at the foot of the stairs
the one I had lighted went out. I was terrified. I tried to
light another match, but there was a draft from somewhere, and it
too was extinguished before I had had time to glance about. I was
immediately conscious of a sort of soft movement around me, as of
shadowy shapes that passed and repassed. Once it seemed to me
that a hand was laid on my shoulder and was not lifted, but instead
dissolved into the other shadows around. The sudden striking of
the clock on the stair landing completed my demoralization. I
turned and fled upstairs, pursued, to my agonized nerves, by
ghostly hands that came toward me from between the spindles of
the stair-rail.

At dawn I went downstairs again, heartily ashamed of myself. I
found that a door to the basement had been left open, and that the
soft movement had probably been my overcoat, swaying in the draft.

Probably. I was not certain. Indeed, I was certain of nothing